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Ilya Shapiro Reinstated at Georgetown Law, then Resigns
The law school reinstated him on a technicality, but made it clear that they weren't going to uphold the university's free speech policy.
It took Georgetown University Law Center four months, longer than most Supreme Court nominations take to get to the finish line, to investigate a single tweet from Ilya Shapiro. Everyone understands what was going on: the tweet was clearly protected by Georgetown's free expression policy and Georgetown could not in good faith punish Shapiro, but the law school wanted to wait until students were off-campus to avoid protest.*
Yet instead of robustly (or even meekly) defending its own policies, Georgetown found in Shapiro's favor on the technicality that his purportedly harassing tweet was tweeted before he was employed by Georgetown. Finding that he did not yet have employee status also provides a convenient way for Georgetown to deny him access to its grievance procedures.
In any event, Georgetown's report suggesting that he would be under intense and continuing scrutiny, and that if Georgetown constituents were offended by additional "similar" speech of his, he would be subject to termination.
Today, Shapiro announced the Wall Street Journal that he has resigned: "Fundamentally, what Mr. Treanor has done—what he's allowed IDEAA to do—is repeal the Speech and Expression Policy that he claims to hold dear. The freedom to speak is no freedom at all if it makes an exception for speech someone finds offensive or counter to some nebulous conception of equity."
After noting that Georgetown law faculty have not been punished for some rather egregious opinions, Shapiro continues:
It's all well and good to adopt strong free-speech policies, but it's not enough if university administrators aren't willing to stand up to those who demand censorship. And the problem isn't limited to cowardly administrators. Proliferating IDEAA-style offices enforce an orthodoxy that stifles intellectual diversity, undermines equal opportunity, and excludes dissenting voices. Even the dean of an elite law school bucks these bureaucrats at his peril.
What Georgetown subjected me to, what it would be subjecting me to if I stayed, is a heckler's veto that leads to a Star Chamber. "Live not by lies," warned Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. "Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me."
I won't live this way.
UPDATE: And here is Shapiro's resignation letter.
*(As readers may remember, in an awkwardly phrased tweet, Shapiro suggested that DC Circuit judge Siri Srinivasan should have been nominated to the Supreme Court, but because President Biden had pledged to appoint a black woman (which Srinivasan is not), a "lesser" black woman would be appointed instead. Despite an apology and explanation from Shapiro, who asserted quite reasonably that his tweet meant to suggest that Srinivasan was the "best" candidate but would not get the job due to Biden's promise, critics insisted that he was asserting that no black woman would be competent to be on the Supreme Court. To say that this is an uncharitable reading of the tweet and his subsequent explanation is an understatement. My own view on such matters is that everyone should be given a fair opportunity to apologize for and explain a badly phrased message; only people who double down deserve a worse fate. If Shapiro, in response to the controversy, had said that he indeed meant that no black woman could ever be qualified for the Court, that might still be speech protected by Georgetown's policies, but he would deserve the criticism he has received for not saying that.)
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The letter (via Fire): https://www.thefire.org/ilya-shapiro-resignation-letter-to-georgetown-university-law-center-june-6-2022/
And I fully agree – Georgetown is looking bad.
Leave academia. Double your salary. Halve your stress.
I liked his examples of the things that could get him investigated by the DIE group at the college. It clearly shows that the policy is ridiculous and only good for removing political enemies.
Good for ol’ Open Borders.
First time I’ve applauded something from him.
I think you’re confusing him with the other Prof Ilya S…
He’s not too bright…
yah
not that they care how they look to people they don’t respect or have to respect, the latter is key.
I have to say that, if Shapiro wasn’t aware things were like this at Georgetown, he really did not do his due diligence before agreeing to be hired by them. Which is not, of course, any sort of defense of Georgetown.
What about Georgetown do you think should have put him on notice?
See, for instance. More than one of the professors involved in this conversation got forced out.
I wasn’t even considering Georgetown for my son, (He’s only 13, after all.) and I was aware of incidents like this. It’s hardly the only one, but Reason only allows one link per comment.
Then there’s Professor Michele Swers, who got in trouble for accurately quoting somebody who used the word “nigger”. Well, when you’re quoting the head of the KKK in an historical document, you’ve got to expect some offensive language.
I really can’t see how Shapiro thought that he’d be free to speak his mind at Georgetown, if he did even the slightest review.
Wow, this letter is a tour de force. Good for him.
…and showcases the double standard of Georgetown and the left.
Yes, but he stops short of saying that he has a free speech right to say that no Black women are good enough for the Supreme Court.
Because that’s not what he said.
You’re right, he did not say that. I guess you are agreeing with me. He was accused of expressing an opinion about who was qualified to sit on the court. He deleted his tweet, and backed off. It would have been nice to see him say that a law professor should be able to express an opinion about who is qualified to site on the court.
He was accused of making a racist comment about who could possibly be qualified to sit on the Court, which is not what he meant. His original tweet was badly phrased and at least potentially subject to misinterpretation.
I don’t think he felt any need to stand up for law professors having racist opinions, because it seems like he doesn’t hold such opinions and doesn’t have interest in advancing them. I think there’s general agreement that law professors can have opinions on who is qualified to sit on the court, and only an idiot would think that was actually the controversy here.
The only thing that was genuinely racist about that tweet was thinking that Srinivasan being Indian WAS a qualification. And I’m willing to believe the tweet was written in a “If Biden were following his own principles” spirit, rather than expressing Shapiro’s own notion of who the best candidate was.
I wouldn’t hold Shapiro to be a racist – but he is a rancid little troll. After all, here is a man who has seen any number of SCOUS nominations and knows damn well politics always plays a part. Anyone want to guess how often Professor Shapiro’s “best” candidate has gotten the nod? Probably few. And so how many times did he slime the person who did got the nod?
No need to guess on that one – he was saving his bile for someone he knew his audience would enjoy watching smeared: A “lesser black women” whose nomination “will always have an asterisk attached”. A nominee not even named.
Here’s a question: Prior to announcing Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination, Trump said this : “I think it should be a woman because I actually like women much more than men.” But our heroic troll Shapiro was then silent in defense of the Meritocracy. And this despite the fact that no one considered ACB the “best” or “most qualified” choice. Absolutely no one. Not a problem, Shapiro-wise!
He gushed she was a “joyous, American‐as‐apple‐pie judge next door” to the Washington Examiner. CNN had him mooning over her “grace and poise”; CBS her “thoughtfulness, grace, and seriousness”. Non-best-candidate notwithstanding, poor Ilya seemed quite smitten. Think he might have used some of those same plaudits on Judge Jackson if he’d waited for her to be named? I’d say no. Shapiro probably doesn’t believe they apply to “lesser black women”. Plus he seems to have a good feel for what his twitter audience wants to hear. And Barrett-like praise for Jackson damn-sure isn’t it.
Yeah, I’m not found of picking people based on immutable characteristics like race or sex, and I’m not fond of it whether done by Democrats or Republicans.
OTOH, an overlay of stupid race/sex based selection over ideology I generally (Maybe 50-60%?) agree with goes over a lot easier than an overlay of stupid race/sex based selection over ideology I abhor.
There are three problems, Brett:
(1) It isn’t just that Shapiro is a hypocrite – that’s a charge we all have to face one time or another – but he’s an olympian-grade monster hypocrite of colossal proportions. Here’s someone who wrote a damn book on SCOUS nominations throwing a playground-grade snit because his “best” choice wouldn’t get nominated. Here’s someone willing to gush over ACB to a cringe-worthy degree because she’s graceful, respected & a respectable choice, but then unloads both barrels of rhetoric on someone who hasn’t even been named as being an un-ideal pick.
(2) And guess what? I bet it never crossed his moonstruck mind to fret whether Judge Barrett got the nod over some “better” choice. She was qualified for the nomination and was good enough. So then what’s with the contempt, pre-Jackson? Fact is, the high principle of Meritocracy always seems to get much higher and more principled when there’s a square-inch of black skin involved. Much less so with a “joyous, American‐as‐apple‐pie judge next door” white woman, of course. And this distinction is particularly true while seeking the perfect target to jazz your twitter audience.
(3) And for this piece of ugly pandering? Professor Shapiro becomes the Right’s latest holy martyr. Now I’ll concede some of that was caused by Georgetown’s blundering – but not all. You guys are the one’s who chose to exalt his trolling hypocritical bullshit.
To tell the truth, I’m puzzled about why Georgetown wanted to hire Shapiro. Were they unaware of his CV? Or was the decision made by somebody who hadn’t gotten the memo about Georgetown only allowing left-wing speech?
I suppose for a fleeting moment they played with the idea of allowing a strictly limited amount of intellectual diversity in the faculty, and then changed their minds, and saw no graceful way of backing out of the hire. Then this stupid tweet gave them an excuse.
1) It was just a tweet, swiftly deleted. We all have brain farts. Maybe he was just awkwardly poking fun at the Democrats for, as I say, self-sabotaging out of their own obsession with intersectionality.
2) Naturally meritocracy gets mentioned if you’re explicitly making a race based selection, on account of your having explicitly rejected making merit primary. Looking at the composition of the bench, by restricting his search to black women, and implicitly black women with significant experience and very left-wing views, Biden excluded something like 97% of the candidate pool from consideration. That didn’t leave a lot of room for merit to operate.
3) Basically all of it was created by Georgetown’s reaction. If they’d blown off the tweet or told their own students to stop reading things they disagree with as uncharitably as possible, it would have been a nothingburger. And they could have taken their time about constructing a less silly basis for firing him.
Of course, Trump explicitly made a gender-based nominee and chose someone with the thinnest resume for a SCOUS seat in decades. Guess what, Brett? No. One. Cared.
Least of all Shapiro. He noted correctly that she was a respected and respectable choice (to step over that low bar), but then was off gushing about her sweet intangibles. I think he mooned over her “grace” in at least three TV interviews. Here’s an assignment for you, Brett: The next time you’re about to sneer over someone’s mention of “white privilege”, picture the wholesome face of Amy Coney Barrett in your mind. Because she never worries her nomination “will always have an asterisk attached”. Jackals don’t dog her because someone “more qualified” might have gotten the slot. That stuff simply doesn’t apply to someone like Barrett, least of all from Professor Ilya Shapiro. Not like it does with a “lesser black woman”.
He made a choice. To throw a blue-face tantrum because his favorite wouldn’t get picked is bizarre. Doubly-so from someone who has watched the messy political business of SCOUS choices his entire professional career. Even more-so from someone who knew the messy political reasons behind ACB’s nomination and didn’t care in the slightest.
Yet he choice to crudely target a black nominee who hadn’t even yet been named. Why? I’m honestly unsure. Maybe it was unconscious, and things like “qualifications” and “merit” just come out differently in his mind as the skin tones darken. More likely it was gleefully sport, as there’s always a ready & responsive audience for that kind of rhetoric with a black person in the crosshairs.
Does it matter which? Imagine yourself a black in one of his classes: Whether he’s capable of grotesque & hypocritical double-standards by race (Barrett vs Jackson) as simple automatic reflex, or targets blacks for malicious fun, you might find yourself worrying either way.
Four Points:
(1) Trump announced beforehand he planned to nominate a women. The usual suspects did not react with shrill indignation, least of all Shapiro. I invite you to answer why….
(2) But suppose Trump didn’t announce it; or say Biden didn’t. So what? I can list the political reasons behind any given SCOUS nomination. So can Shapiro. So can you. Are you claiming this pious posturing and Shapiro’s vulgar hissy fit was over the announcement and not the deed? That the latter without the former would have been fig leaf enough? (I just want a sense of how important hypocrisy is for you on this issue. It’s clearly everything to Shapiro)
(3) Do you honestly think Biden’s “pandering” here is any different than Trump’s ?!? Or any number of nominations recent & past?Maybe you’ll want to claim Biden invented “pandering” for SCOUS choices, or it’s a problem of the Left. That would take an awesomely restrictive pair of blinders! It would be like saying the Democrats are addicted to “identity politics” in the Age of Trump.
(4) I’m not sure why Shapiro’s pet favorite is important, much less my opinion on ACB alternates. Please note: Although she’s about to become part of a history-grade blunder by the SCOUS, I’ve never claimed her nomination was illegitimate. In contrast to Shapiro. His sneer about a “lesser black woman” carrying “an asterisk attached” was double-standard invective of the highest order. It would have been crude juvenile self-indulgence even if Shapiro had recently gushed over Barrett like a moonstruck calf. But given he did, it was jaw-dropping bizarre.
So why’d he do it? Simple: A black face makes such an appealing target to some people. He couldn’t help himself…..
Yeah, and he didn’t say that Hitler was good either. What a coward!
Exhibiting the very bad faith assumption that undergirds all Leftist arguments, thanks
Well, this is about on par with rhetoric on the right. Criticism of the NRA is a “blood libel.” Those who oppose Christian nationalism are “terrorists.” BDS is “anti-Semitic.” And now, Georgetown is essentially Stalinist.
Shapiro is a big baby and saw more opportunity in a high-profile exit, pandering to the culture warriors, than in doing whatever work he was planning to do at GULC. Which seems to suggest it won’t be much of a loss to GULC. Good riddance.
Shapiro criticizes Georgetown without using the words Stalinist or any derivative.
SimonP: You see how crazy he is, he accuses Georgetown of being “essentially Stalinist.”
Neat rhetorical trick to put hyperbole in someone else’s mouth, and then accuse him of hyperbole.
David, please don’t pretend you’re this dense. He quotes Solzhenitsyn when describing how he was hot would be) treated by Georgetown. The implication is obvious to any reasonably literate person.
I don’t think quoting someone is normally interpreted as suggesting that you share the quoted individual’s life circumstances. He said exactly what he meant, that G’town was setting him up for “a heckler’s veto that leads to a Star Chamber.” Not the gulag.
I think it’s a Kinsley gaffes, personally.
Do you actually think he was treated fairly? Would you accept you or your family to be held to something like the unevenly enforced standard to which he is apparently being held in order to continue employment?
That said, he *surely* knew what he was getting into working in hyper woke academia. I don’t really get him being surprised by what happened.
No, I don’t think any of this makes sense. Shapiro’s tweet was stupid and implicitly racist. Georgetown’s reaction was overboard and “woke.” The right-wings elevation of the conflict into a cause celebre has been ridiculous and tiresome. A pox on all these houses, as far as I’m concerned.
But I think that someone with a reasonable level of professionalism and maturity would take the Georgetown “report” in stride and let this pan out. The fever will break, people will wind down, and if he gets lynched again he can use it as a platform to shed light on the continuing problem. Have some god damn balls, for Christ’s sake.
Instead he’s taking his toys home and publishing a high profile op-Ed in the WSJ. It’s just utter wankery.
It’s like with Kavanaugh. Did I care about, or even believe, the sex harassment allegations? Not particularly. But then this crybaby we’ve put on the Supreme Court threw a tantrum in the hearings, warning Democrats of the consequences for crossing him. Conservatives all seem to be like this. Goddamn children when dealing with the petty annoyances of the left, wailing and gnashing their teeth like they’re martyrs. So sick of it.
“Shapiro’s tweet was stupid and implicitly racist.”
Eh, it was undeniably stupid, and made me question why he’d been working at Cato, but I don’t think it was particularly racist, save in its validation of racial/ethnic selection criteria for the Supreme court. Just badly worded. “Implicitly” racist just makes the charge unfalsifiable, IMO.
I don’t expect you, of all people, to recognize implicit racism, Brett. So you don’t have much to offer on that point.
Basically simonP can call anything he wants racist in order to make his argument so that he doesn’t have to deal with inconvenient facts or truths.
I can make the argument, Jesse. I’m just not going to be rope-a-doped into it by trolls who will disagree no matter how well I make the point. Present company included.
It would only be “implicitly racist” if Shapiro had no idea who the alternative black candidates would be, and just assumed that ANY black candidate would necessarily be not-as-good as Srinivasan. But given that everyone who was following the nomination in fact knew the pool of two or three whom Biden was considering, and given that it was Shapiro’s job, literally, to follow such things, that would be a ridiculous thing to believe. Rather, he was just saying, implicitly, that none of the 2 or 3 candidates Biden is considering are as good as Srinivasan. I’m sure most of the people piling on were unaware of these things, but even those who knew dcelined to refrain from piling.
“Rather, he was just saying, implicitly, that none of the 2 or 3 candidates Biden is considering are as good as Srinivasan. ”
Absolutely — when the results of the test that all prospective nominees must take were leaked to the media, it was clear that Srinivasan had scored well above all other prospective nominees. I don’t know if Shapiro had advanced notice of the test results, but in hindsight the whole incident leave us wondering why we use such tests when a president can bring all kinds of wacky issues to the choice of a nominee.
There is no special test for SCOTUS, but that doesn’t mean that people can’t have an opinion regarding who would make the best Justice. I happen to personally think it’s an inherently political appointment, so the “best” candidate of whomever the president desires for political reasons.
People have opinions on which guitarist is best too (Hendrix, Clapton, etc.) which are as ridiculous. There are scores, maybe hundreds, of jurists and lawyers that are eminently qualified to sit on the Court. His intent was to be provocative, which is fine. But you have to be able to take the heat.
“There is no special test for SCOTUS”
Of course there is — here in D.C. my next door neighbor runs a prep session for it. The fact that you are not familiar with it suggests only that you have never been considered for a nomination.
I agree that everyone can have an opinion regarding who would make the best justice — Shapiro went beyond that “best justice” to make an assertion about the best qualified, which implies that he was aware of the objective measures.
Shapiro was essentially arguing that, from a left wing perspective, Srinivasan was the best pick, on account of representing an ethnic group that had never been on the Court, rather than just an intersection of two groups that were already on the Court, and being a rather smarter progressive who’d probably better advance the left’s causes. He better met the left’s own criteria.
Essentially he was pointing out that the left’s obsession with intersectionality was leading to self-sabotage.
Shapiro’s resignation letter kinda reeks of a pejorative tone.
Surely he has pejorative intent when he says “transgress progressive orthodoxy”.
He must mean something is bad there. Are all orthodoxies bad?
Conservative orthodoxy? Libertarian orthodoxy? Constitutional orthodoxy? No, those are probably the good ones. But if someone were to transgress those orthodoxies, Shapiro would be the first to defend them?
“Libertarian orthodoxy” and “conservative orthodoxy” tend to consist of “these are my principles, and if you don’t like them, I’ll get new ones.”
If those things are worth defending, have at it.
Progressive orthodoxy, in contrast, means seeing a fellow-progressive say or do the stupidest thing imaginable and then say “hold my beer, I’m going to be even stupider.”
If he thinks one specific individual is the best candidate then all other candidates of any race are — by that judgement— inferior to the best one.
He’s not supposed to say that though because the special people have an absolute right to never feel like they’re not always everyone’s favorite. Everyone else’s feelings don’t matter at all because everyone else is second class (at best) in the holy grievance Olympics.
So he was 100% right.
No, it was not “implicitly racist.”
And how exactly was it the “right wing” that elevated this into a cause celebre? They didn’t throw tantrums about the tweet. They didn’t pretend to conduct a months-long sham “investigation.” And they didn’t throw a second tantrum when Shapiro was exonerated on a technicality.
That having been said, I do agree that people who want to hold themselves out as thought leaders have to stop snowflaking themselves. Bari Weiss quit the NYT. Shapiro quit Georgetown. Grow up! Was Georgetown setting him up to fail? Maybe. So what? Record every conversation and class to protect yourself from specious complaints, sure. But don’t quit just because they’re being mean to you.
Right-wing commenters spent weeks talking about Shapiro’s tweet and the reaction it got. I’m surprised you’ve forgotten.
But where I agree is that conservatives need to stop “snowflaking,” if they want to do anything about “wokism.” A lot of the dumbest wokism is happening in contexts where a perverse bureaucratic logic compels a kind of performative extremism. But it’s all fake. Call the bluff.
The reason conservatives aren’t doing this, of course, is that there’s more money to make from the chumps on the right by being a high profile martyr to wokism than there is to wear it down from the inside. It’s all culture war opportunism, masquerading as standing on principle. And the chumps are just lapping it up.
Just keep getting punched in the face. Never fight back.
There is no special test for SCOTUS, but that doesn’t mean that people can’t have an opinion regarding who would make the best Justice. I happen to personally think it’s an inherently political appointment, so the “best” candidate of whomever the president desires for political reasons.
Srinivasan would have been a excellent candidate, and anyone who preferred him to the named candidates is entitled to say so. But to say that he is obviously objectively better than any of the black woman candidates is special pleading at best, and likely worse.
That said, I expect that if Biden gets another opening. Srinivasan might well be the pick precisely because, besides being an excellent candidate, he is Asian. And that’s fine. There is no such thing as an objectively best candidate. There are at least hundreds of excellent ones. Funny how Republican Presidents find highly-qualified Republicans and Democratic Presidents find highly-qualified Democrats. Nobody gets their knickers in a twist over that. And no body whining now got their knickers in a twist when a black man with a resume that wouldn’t get a white Republican anywhere near the Supreme Court got appointed precisely because he was black.
“And no body whining now got their knickers in a twist when a black man with a resume that wouldn’t get a white Republican anywhere near the Supreme Court got appointed precisely because he was black.”
And nobody claiming that Shapiro’s tweet was racist has said anything about the many liberals who have said things similar to what you said about Clarence Thomas.
Pointing out that a specific black person is factually under-qualified is never racist.
Shapiro’s tweets were explicitly racist, in my opinion. Not the lesser black woman part, but the part where he accused Biden of being racist himself. Tagging diversity efforts as “racism” is very sick… and especially cringe-worthy when done as a push poll.
Wait, you’re saying it’s racist of Shapiro to notice that Biden was being racist by declaring an explicit racial quota for the seat?
Look, there’s no “I mean well” exception for racism. No matter how much the left want’s to immunize themselves against the charge on account of their motives being good in their own opinions.
You throw meritocracy out the window to make explicitly race based decisions, you’re a racist.
You can define “racism” that way, but then you’re adopting the left’s new definition in which racism is in the eye of the beholder and so everything is racist. Saying “the storm caused a blackout” is racist.
I prefer the objective definition in which a racist is someone with an affirmative belief that one race is superior to another. But yeah, I’m probably the only one still using the word that way. As you’ve shown, the right is only too happy to go along with the left here and throw around “racism” to describe anything remotely race-related. The word still has some residual rhetorical impact from when it was meaningful… but not for much longer.
Are you seriously denying that a white Republican with Clarence Thomas’s thin resume would not have stood a chance of getting nominated? Are you seriously denying that Thomas was picked precisely because he was black? “Many liberals” said those things because they were true. Deny it if you can.
Bari Weiss is doing outstanding work. Her exit from the NYT was a big win for journalism and for the ability of the public to know.
https://bariweiss.substack.com/
Her exit from the NYT was a big win for journalism and for the ability of the public to know.
This is true. Just not for the reasons you think.
Because you think journalism exists to hide knowledge from the public, I guess.
Another case where things aren’t for the reasons you think.
Since you won’t say what you mean, people can only guess.
Since you are hiding what you mean, it’s a fair guess that you support hiding information, perhaps in order to deceive people.
In my experience, honest people say what they mean.
It’s pretty clear what he means lol.
You also seem to be mixing up opinion with knowledge. Which, given your posting history, checks out.
Wrong. And wrong again.
Sarcastro gets it. You, Ben, not so much.
The tweet was implicitly racist. Why did Shapiro make a point of recommending a dark-skinned woman, if race were not a central consideration?
In your world everything is “implicitly” racist. The point of his tweet was to point out that it was wrong to announce that only a Black “woman” (PBJ or whatever her initials are apparently isn’t sure if she qualifies on that account) to the exclusion of all others.
He didn’t.
What are you, a biologist?
I assume that Sri Srinivasan will be surprised to hear that he is a woman.
Ilya Shapiro: “Since Georgetown has made it clear that I will have to perpetually self-censor to keep my job, I quit.”
Bari Weiss: “Since NYT made it clear that I will have to perpetually censor my journalism to fit NYT’s ‘Party line’ to keep my job, I quit.”
David Nieporent: “Grow up!”
Well, it’s pretty rich that conservatives talk about how all of these institutions are captured by liberals and then refuse to work there.
Yeah, it turns out being in a minority isn’t necessarily all that fun. But these are generally the same people who make fun of companies’ efforts to make workplaces more hospitable for marginalized groups, so it can be hard to feel too much sympathy.
The feelings of the special people must always be catered to in every utterance. Even the feelings they pretend to feel to advance grievance narratives.
If you’re not one of the special people then “grow up”.
Yes, grow up. Don’t demand a safe space because you don’t like being challenged. If he says something that gets him investigated/fired, then he can complain. But don’t preemptively quit just because you don’t want to take the heat.
you were good until the second paragraph.
Wait. You’re attacking someone you agree was most likely falsely accused for standing up to those falsely accusing him? What would your reaction be if those accusations been made against you? “Thank you for noticing me?”
“the petty annoyances of the left”
That sounds like something a racist and a rapist would say.
Do you actually think…
Obviously not.
Criticism of the NRA is a “blood libel.”
That’s news to me. It’s pretty common for gun advocates to criticize the NRA.
Don’t let Dave Kopel know.
Oh, he knows. Which is he he never said that criticism of the NRA is “blood libel”.
Despite the lies of his critics.
With respect, how big of an illiterate fucking moron are you, exactly? Prof. Lopes wrote, in this very website,
https://reason.com/volokh/2022/05/27/we-reject-your-sick-and-twisted-lies-against-us/
Lemme explain this: “Criticism” of the NRA isn’t blood libel. Criticizing the NRA as being responsible for murder is blood libel. Get the distinction? “Blood libel” is accusing people of being guilty of murder, falsely, based on group membership.
You can criticize the NRA in lots of ways without being guilty of blood libel: Money being spent on lavish living for people like LaPierre, rigging the board elections to prevent the membership from regaining control, you can disagree with the NRA’s policy preferences, or think that the NRA’s lobbying is relatively ineffectual compared to the money spent on it. None of these would be “blood libel”.
So then, you’re confirming Simon’s point: the right does equate criticism of the NRA with blood libel. “The NRA’s policies are tantamount to murder” is blood libel. Pretty ridiculous (and insulting, on multiple levels)!
With respect, how big of an illiterate fucking moron are you, exactly?
You might try a little self-examination rather than casting stones here, given that you seem unable to understand the difference between the generalization “criticisms of X are blood libel” vs “this/these specific types of allegations is/are blood libel”.
Ilya Shapiro: “Since Georgetown has made it clear that I will have to perpetually self-censor to keep my job, I quit.”
SimonP: “Shapiro is a big baby.”
Actually as he frequently provides us evidence, SimonP is a “big baby.”
David and Simon to Rosa Parks: grow up and stop being a baby.
Oh dear Benx, your mind was a terrible thing to waste. Rosa didn’t turn tail and run home like Shapiro, she fought for her rights.
If Shapiro wasn’t such a baby, he would fight for his rights at Georgetown. It might be a little tiresome, but he’d probably win in the end. All this woke stuff is bluster and bluffing, just call it. But no, he thinks he has a martyrdom opportunity here if he throws a fit and goes home. But it’s not martyrdom when it’s self-inflicted. It’s just being a baby.
If I recall, she was too tired at the time to turn tail and run.
I’m not sure what your area of expertise is, but you should probably stick to it.
No, Parks was not “too tired” to move.
David and Simon would still treat him like shit no matter how much he “would fight for his rights at Georgetown”. The feelings of the special people matter and everyone else’s rights don’t.
“Rosa Parks didn’t do nuthin’ but sit her Black ass down!”
~ Cedrid the Entertainer as “Eddie” in Barbershop
Mr. Shapiro should welcome a chance to avoid entanglement with the progressive, liberal-libertarian mainstream and align himself with his preferred movement conservatism. Any of the conservative-controlled campuses — Regent, Liberty, Ouachita Baptist, Hillsdale, Biola, Wheaton, Grove City, Franciscan, Oral Roberts, Cedarbrook or many like them — would be a more natural, better fit for Mr. Shapiro.
I just hope Georgetown can withstand the loss of Mr. Shapiro’s contributions to campus — especially the lesser Black women at Georgetown.
Rev. Name a jurisdiction that has been successful when governed by a diverse in the past 600 years. Pick anywhere, any size, any definition of success. This guy did very well. He would be a trillionaire at today’s gold prices. Much gold. Many slaves, of course. In addition to the splendor of great wealth, started public schools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa
When they kicked out the British, they caused millions of deaths and long lasting poverty.
Does the letter mention the new job he obviously has lined up?
I don’t know if he has a new job lined up or if he’s going to do an “I was cancelled” tour as others have.
The tweet limit is a problem. I may be wrong, but what I took him to mean was ‘That by restricting the candidates to one sex, and one skin color, the choice will always be tainted by questions of whether better candidates were excluded from consideration.’ And he is correct.
That’s why I was never tempted to use Twitter. The site seems specifically designed to prevent you from expressing anything nuanced or complex.
Which suits the capabilities of most tweeters.
The correct term for Twitter users is Twits.
…as in pompous twit?
You can do a thread
If one assumes the best minds are untainted by any form of bigotry, sure a specific non-female, non-black candidate could be better. In such an unlikely world, an all white male membership would still result in fair and equitable results to every citizen. But even the briefest reading of our nation’s greatest document, the Constitution, shows that even those great minds had trouble seeing women and people of color as equal participants in our democracy. And as replacement theory roils through the conservative zeitgeist one again, it’s good to see that at least the US Supreme Court, the least representative branch of government, has finally managed to reach 44% female after more than 200 years. (Despite all the whining about how there was some male out there with better credentials.)
And Biden getting bum rushed into committing to a Black Woman by Clyburn is a great counter example to the frailties of the founding fathers, no?
But by your reasoning, you wouldn’t be achieving a lack of bias by picking instead black candidates. At best you’d be achieving a different bias.
Because if you assume whites are biased on the basis of their being white, doesn’t that imply that blacks are biased on the basis of their being black?
We all have to make choices now, it’s not just Mr. Shapiro. One obvious choice is to move Georgetown towards the bottom of the list of schools. By no means should we stop supporting the mission of education, but we ought to give our attention to other, better institutions. It’s no use getting a degree from places that don’t, in fact, educate you.
Isn’t it the job of a lawyer to anticipate the uncharitable ways in which words will be interpreted?
I think that’s probably part of the job of a lawyer who practices in court, certainly. A law professor who is teaching supposed adults? Not so much. Frankly, any student who automatically jumps to the least charitable reading of an utterance and sticks by it should probably not get a passing grade.
His primary job wasn’t going to be teaching, it was an executive-level administrative position. Such people do need to choose their public words carefully.
In the end he resigned, and Georgetown is undoubtedly relieved that he did.
What law did his words violate? Do you mean PR?
Do you think that part of this outrage might stem from students confusing him with Ben Shapiro?
Current crop of “students” are capable of confusing anything.
“What is a woman”?
Good one. That movie was great. The Dean of Medicine from Brown was an insane person
Sigh. I anticipated this result when I read Mr. Shapiro’s editorial in the WSJ, stating how Georgetown had stood by their free-speech principles . . . I thought he was wildly optimistic and thought to myself, “Wonder how long THIS will last!” Never dreamed it’d be less than a single week!
Good for him. If you’re going to burn the bridge, burn it in the middle too on your way out.
Too bad Georgetown will learn nothing from this. If anything, they’ll be more bold in the future to enforce speech codes.
…but only when conservatives speak.
When Liberty University hires a liberal, openly gay teacher or administrator, you let us know, m’kay?
Georgetown is a private religious institution, like Liberty U. Both of them have the right to express their religious beliefs and require employees to live within them. Schools like Liberty censor liberal speech and try to weed out employees who don’t share their specific brand of conservatism. (Pool boy shenanigans aside.)
If you think Georgetown will suffer much from this incident, you’re sorely mistaken. Shapiro said something clumsy and nominally racist and stupid, which is a bad sign for an administrator at a highly ranked Jesuit school.
“Georgetown is a private religious institution, like Liberty U. Both of them have the right to express their religious beliefs and require employees to live within them.”
The difference is Liberty actually exercises this right and Georgetown does not.
https://lgbtq.georgetown.edu/
Shapiro pointed to a case of a professor endorsing demonstrations in front of Justices’ homes to induce them to make a pro-abortion decision.
A Catholic university which actually enforces its beliefs would fire that guy.
Or maybe the “Catholic” label is just for gullible donors and their actual religion is Wokeness.
Always be telling Catholics what they should consider heresy.
Some folks just seem to yearn for the Church of the inquisition.
Always be telling Catholics what they should consider heresy.
Yeah, it’s not like those beliefs have been written down and published anywhere.
Some folks just seem to yearn for the Church of the inquisition.
Yes, because terminating someone’s employment is a Spanish Inquisition-like tactic (which, by the way, no one expects).
You forgot to add that he’s, “literally Hitler”.
What makes you think they learned nothing from it? They got rid of him, didn’t they? Maybe they would have preferred the chance to put him through the wringer once or twice more before that pre-ordained end, but I’m sure they’re happy enough with the outcome.
One outcome of this sorry episode was to confirm that Shapiro is not C-suite material. He is a gifted law professor. Maybe he should stick to the classroom as he is not yet ready for ‘prime time’.
Nailed it.
What, may I ask, are you talking about? His only experience as a law professor was a brief stint as an adjunct legal writing teaching 15+ years ago.
Nas….Professor Shapiro is a legal luminary. Nobody seriously questions that. But he is not ‘C-Suite’ material. This whole sorry episode was a classic ‘own goal’ by Shapiro that C-suite execs do NOT make.
If I am mistaken on law school experience for Professor Shapiro, my apologies.
The point is that regardless of what you feel about Shapiro, he makes it clear that Georgetown U is in favour of “free speech but…”, and that is generally invidious, whether practiced by left or right.
So now he gets to join the Weiss Club of highly Compensated Flouncers.
Wonder how many other lazy muppets will play the try-to-get-fired-and-fail-then-quit “cancellation” game.
I admit it is a great gig – take to the WSJ and the NYT to tell everyone how you were cancelled, and then the speaking circuit, where lots of people who don’t want to take any responsibility for being assholes will hang on their every word.
Damn but the wingnut-welfare circuit is nice.
I don’t know Weiss’s situation, but I won’t put the uncharitable interpretation on her acts without a lot more evidence.
As for Shapiro, if he were trying to get fired he would have designed a Tweet which was more artful and clear. Maybe he would have said “transgenderism is stupid; men are men and women are women.” His defenders wouldn’t have to explain that the Tweet was “inartful,” they’d be too busy cheering him for speaking the truth to power.
Weiss is a lifelong, loud misfit who leaves essentially every organization with which she is affiliated — back to high school or even middle school — in a self-righteous, disaffected, grievance-consumed huff. The organizations that try to work with her come to regret it.
She was a rich kid whose circumstances have cushioned her against the customary consequences of being an antisocial malcontent and serial quitter.
Her highly interesting Wikipedia profile (which I will accept, not as authoritative, but at least as more authoritative than *you*) shows her to be contentious and combative. For instance,
“Following the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, Weiss was a guest on Real Time with Bill Maher in early November 2018. She said of American Jews who support President Donald Trump: ‘I hope this week that American Jews have woken up to the price of that bargain: They have traded policies that they like for the values that have sustained the Jewish people—and frankly, this country—forever: Welcoming the stranger; dignity for all human beings; equality under the law; respect for dissent; love of truth.'”
You’d think those sort of remarks would get her in the good graces of the world’s Kirklands.
Yet the Kirklands of the world offer you a strictly package deal: agree with the progressives on *everything,* or be a clinger headed for replacement.
No amount of denouncing Trump as a hater and an inciter to mass murder can make up for her Zionism or for her criticism of left-wing crazies (now known as the establishment).
My understanding is that Georgetown has paid Shapiro for the months of pending investigation during which he did no work. What a deal.
“Second, any harm done by my tweet was done by those seeking that Georgetown fire me. I deleted my tweet well before any student was likely to learn of it. Screen captures of the tweet were then disseminated by others seeking to harm me because of
my political views. It was they, not I, who intentionally and knowingly caused any harm to any student who later came to learn of and read their screen captures of the tweet. It is they, not I, who are morally culpable for any such resulting harm.”
How could Georgetown bear to lose a legal mind of this caliber? Will their law school ever recover?
The tweet was nothing. It’s hard to believe the snowflake-ness going on with a word that is blasting out of every car stereo in the hood non-stop.
Just really get a grip
It was unlikely any student would see this, except for the inevitable screen captures, the wayback machine, and any student better at using a search engine than I am. (Which is all of them.)
Bet his VCR still blinks “12:00”
“Since Georgetown has made it clear that I will have to perpetually self-censor to keep my job, I quit.”
Sorry, but this is bullshit posturing – claiming martyrdom so he can go on to bigger, dumber, more lucrative, things.
If he wanted to prove a point about Georgetown he shouldn’t have quit. He should have stayed, said whatever pleased, and then, if he got fired, he would have made his pint way more convincingly than by writing this petulant letter.
Georgetown sucks. He decided to move along.
Good for him
His public resignation letter will hurt his future prospects more than Georgetown’s.
What he should have done was resign and release the explanation you’ve seen in so many post-scandal resignations, where he regrets leaving but feels he must do so for the good of the Center where his continued presence would be a distraction.
By lashing out instead all he accomplishes is to convince more people who might offer him a shot at a similar role that they should find another candidate. Not because what he did was terrible, it was careless at worst, but how he has handled it.
Shapiro isn’t racist. These people are nuts.
Any time you’re about to type the phrase “lesser black [anything referring to a human]”, stop yourself.
We have a long history of “lesser black” in this country and roughly 4 million people who have a visceral understanding of how that impacts their lives.
If you still say it in a moment of weakness, distraction, or bad auto-correct, for the love of all that is holy to you, do not then blame the responses to your stupidity or bad luck on a conspiracy. Own what you said, apologize, and maybe exercise a little self-censorship.
Anytime you decide you’re limiting your search to just black women stop yourself
That’s how you get “lesser” candidates
One question and two comments.
Q1: 4 million?
C1: Did you just type l****r b***k twice, without stopping yourself?
C2: Imagine a test where you take that second sentence and post it as a standalone tweet. An outraged person then claims you’re a right-winger, and makes up something about the 4 million referring to some subset of white people (since it can’t possibly refer to 41 million African-Americans. Your statement is unclear, some might even say inartful, and it contains the same racial slur Shapiro used.
His was a brilliant letter.
I would only make one change, adding as a conclusion “I think too highly of my ass to invite you to kiss it.”
Georgetown didn’t want a right-wing bigot in a position to make decisions that could affect students. Shapiro is gone. Georgetown has won. Shapiro can await replacement somewhere else, ideally at an institution that favors his stale, ugly thinking.
I think that it’s not only Georgetown and academia that looks bad here … FIRE has been utterly incapable of rectifying egregious academic violations of free speech (the other that comes to mind is Joshua Katz formerly at Princeton).
This is one of those rare times that I agree with Bernstein. I didn’t like Shapiro’s original tweet, which was poorly phrased, but when he promptly explained, apologized, and deleted it, that should have been the end of the matter.
Oh yeah, Georgetown absolutely overreacted. And then doubled down.
But Shapiro’s showboating during and after is not covering him in glory.
Super shallow. You’re complaining that a victim of mistreatment shouldn’t get sympathy because his performance wasn’t stylish enough.
If he had said to Georgetown, in response to the original events, “Screw this. I did nothing wrong, and I’m not going to sit here and have a sham ‘investigation’ held over my head for months. If you won’t stand behind me, then I withdraw,” I could’ve respected that. But waiting months until they decided not to take action, and then saying, “Screw you; now I don’t want the job” is classless.
It’s actually reminiscent of that 1619 Project woman, offered the journalism professor job at UNC. There was pushback, and a long debate about whether the job offer would be rescinded, and then they announced she would get the job after all. And then — only then — did she say, “Screw you; now I don’t want the job.”
Georgeto_n?